The metal seemed to melt into her palm; the golden flesh latching onto her fingers like a leech. Gripping it with more and more force as she climbed, it began to bleach her hand which was the colour of fresh gingerbread to a bright white, starting with her knuckles and then slowly tinting each fingertip until she resembled an old china doll that her aunt had once gifted her but she had kept in the...

Dusk fell down around me in a vast billowing curtain. When I was little I thought that dusk was when the sun sets and the truth is that even as I wrote it there I still imagined a golden tunnel in the sky, run through with pink clouds that looked so much like candyfloss it was as though someone had unstuck them from a children’s book and plastered them about the landscape. Dusk is not sunset. If a...